Structure Effects/Services Coverage

I thought that Cities XL had a good system where services that used roads (hospitals with ambulances, schools with buses, police stations with police cars, fire stations with fire trucks, etc) had an "area of effect" that went along the transportation system. A police headquarters on an expressway right next to a connection to a freeway (if the freeway served the entire city) could serve virtually the entire city if there was low congestion. The same type of police headquarters would only serve a neighborhood if it was placed in the middle of that neighborhood on a small congested road (with the entire neighborhood having small congested roads). If we want helicopters, planes, and/or gyrocopters (gyrocopters are used by some fire districts and the military), then they can have a circular area of effect (radius of effect). Large hospitals, police headquarters (deluxe police station), fire department landing strip (firefighting airplane), city fire department (firefighting gyrocopter), news headquarters, swat headquarters (with swat helicopter), and military bases/fields/etc, can have radii of effect.
 
I think that we should have a grid in order to know where things are located and to snap to things (and to calculate area of effect). Our grid would allow the player to turn on reference grids (for more efficient placing) and have secondary reference grids for when players have non-orthagonal roads.

Yes, Cities XL had effect distances measured by network, which is the way we should do it as well, I think. What I'm suggesting, though, is that rather than those effects being different for every house, the network distance is measured on the basis of road segments and the houses adjoining that segment inherit the same value. So for example, there are twelve houses lining a road; The game calculates the police coverage value for that road, and then that value is passed equally to all the houses. That way we could be doing 1/12 the calculations, but not sacrifice a significant amount of realism (after all, how different is your police coverage going to be from another house on the same block?).

As for the total coverage area, I don't think that should be based on network, it should be partitioned into "precints" ( or whatever the equivalent for fire/hospital would be) as I suggested a while back. For aerial coverage, I think that rather than trying to calculate a circular AOE, it would be better to just give a straight bonus across the station's coverage area, i.e., adding a helicopter to a police station would give a straight +2 (or whatever) to every area in that precint on top of their normal coverage. (Fire landing strips should be a different beast, I think... as far I know, planes are really only used for forest/wildfires). What effect would you suggest for military bases?

I agree with you that there should be an optional grid for placement (as I mentioned before,) as long as the game itself isn't tile-based.

Maybe the larger buildings could be city wide. I would assume that a fire landing strip would be able to cover everything in a 10km radius so why not make it city wide? I guess we could use precincts. In my head, a precinct is the same as 1x1km neighborhood but you might want an Urbs Urbis style precinct that would let you arbitrarily set the size and shape of a precinct. If you want to lower processor work, then by all means simplify, streamline, and (I forgot the word) the processes so all buildings in the precinct or along the road get the same level of service. The problem would be a long and straight road with no intersections would realistically lower in service coverage after a big distance (Cities XL is good with this) and would lower service even more with congestion.  I, personally, think that it should not be a flat all or nothing along the entire stretch but should be distance related.
 
The thing with military bases is that they would increase Peace and Security (Police) but would lower Aura/Mayor Rating. With Parks, their should certainly be a circular or spherical area of effect. I have heard about spherical areas of effect for noise pollution with 3D objects blocking sound and thus lowering Noise Pollution (SC4 had traffic noise).

Good point, I suppose a city isn't too likely to have more than one airstrip for firefighting planes; It could even be regional. In fact, you could even just make it an add-on for regular airstrips that goes into effect once you purchase it (i.e., you buy a special hangar for the fire plane at the local airport) rather than a separate structure.

I wouldn't go so far as to equalize the services coverage for a whole neighborhood, I think; for a long, straight road, it would simply be divided into notional "blocks" at a predetermined length, even if there was no actual intersection. That way the coverage would gradually get weaker with distance, just not on a house-by-house basis. Incidentally, I wouldn't want to automatically equate police precincts with neighborhoods either; one police station could be covering several neighborhoods in a low-density area, or vice-versa in a high-density one.

I don't think military bases would provide any police effect (unless you wanted to add a "Martial Law" button ;) ). In fact, I think it would be just the opposite. As I see it the benefit would be mainly economic: the soldiers spend their money and generate revenue for local businesses, but their salary is paid by the national government.

Parks should actually be network-based rather than radial, at least for the effects on satisfaction/desirability; after all, a person needs to use a road or path of some kind to get to the park if they're going to enjoy it.

I suppose noise pollution should work that way ideally, but I can't think of any way to factor in the blocking effects of 3D structures without a massive investment of computing power; not really worth it for such a marginal effect. Of course, if someone had a simple way of computing it I'd be all ears :)

Land value and pollution (reduction) tend to be radial but leisure/sports/recreation/health/satisfaction in real life is indeed network based. Some "parks"/green spaces provide no (legal) leisure satisfaction but lower pollution, provide "buffers" to catch pollution to prevent it from spreading or in same cases flood prevention. I do not believe that parks should require network access unless they had trails or employees (for maintainance of facilities). A single wind power plant should never require network access either, though special windmill fields that employ one or two employees should require network access or otherwise would have some sort of "no worker" or "no road access" warning or zot. There should be 2 types of parks/plazas: grid based (plop, take up a recatangular space on a multiple of 5 or 10 meters) and free zone based, where parks would fill blank areas freely (including curves and shorelines) or fill up free space in a zone (sorrounded by a 5 meter thick fence area, that is seperate and can be deleted or the cheapest dirt roads).
 
ETA: Even SimCity 4 had a way to determine "Traffic Noise" reduction by the presence of BAT (buildings/3D objects) between the houses and busy roads.